Nowadays, a lot of clinical systems are based on the DICOM standard. The DICOM standard provides several procedure steps for processing medical data. Particularly, DICOM standard part 3, section 7, point 3.1 defines procedure steps and classifies two types of procedure steps, namely “scheduled procedure steps” and “performed procedure steps”. The scheduled procedure steps refer to those actions for steps which are planned or scheduled, respectively, whereas the performed procedure steps refer to those actions or steps, having actually been performed. The scheduled procedure steps might differ from the performed procedure steps, particularly in case of emergency situation, which generally might lead to a change of the scheduled taskflow.
Thus, important information is to be seen in what kind of procedure steps have been performed on the data objects and what kind of procedure steps only have been scheduled for these data objects. This information has to be consistent across all created data. With other words referential integrity must be maintained.
The applicant has developed a platform, the syngoII platform for running a plurality of applications. The applications, also named as tasks in this respect, are independently developed by independent developer groups. Up to now it was necessary that each of these applications (tasks) itself dealt separately with maintaining referential integrity. Thus, in the state of the art this was very error-prone and time-consuming procedure.